The New Biographical Dictionary of Fandom

As silly as it is to believe that a contrary opinion invalidates one's own, it is just as silly to believe that qualified agreement validates it. We don't read the criticism of a book or a movie in order to always find agreement. Disagreement can sometimes be more valuable if one has learned something one didn't know - about the book or the movie or about virtually anything else. I wasn't especially surprised to discover that Clive James was as exasperated by David Thomson's magnum compendium The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, now in its 6th edition, as I was. I reviewed the 4th edition for Senses of Cinema in 2004. In the June 2011 issue of The Atlantic, Clive James reviewed the 5th edition. I was bewildered, however, when James gave the book his qualified approval. I called my review "Confessions of a Film Hater," and I opened it: 

As an artistic medium, which is a distinction lost on most filmgoers, film is particularly needy of critical clarity. If this has been slowly, often painfully, realized over the years – at the expense of too many fortunes and reputations – it is no thanks to the hangers-on of the medium, who are in it for ephemeral fame or simply the vicarious thrill of rubbing up against, even in effigy, the likes of Jack Nicholson and Nicole Kidman. It is these particular people who are always there to remind us that it’s only a movie. 

Clive James called his review "Hollywood: A Love Letter," and found the book provocative but ended with a more favorable review than it deserved: 

After five editions in 35 years, Thomson’s famous compendium of biographical sketches about the movie people—hey, it’s read by the movie people, the movie people are fighting to get into it, male stars measure their manhood by the length of their entry—is still a shantytown with the ambitions of a capital city. It gets bigger all the time without ever becoming more coherent. But with more than a thousand pages of print to wander in, only the most churlish visitor would complain about lack of cogency. Better to rejoice at the number of opportunities to scream in protest at what the author has left out, put in, skimmed over, or gone on about with untoward zeal. As a book meant to be argued with, it’s a triumph. 

To me, Thomson seems much more interested in the people in front of the camera, actors - more specifically the female ones - than he does about the medium of film. This is most noticeable at those moments in the book when he is acutely unfair to the people behind the camera. The number of truly great names he throws to the dogs is incredible. The seven syllabled names that still sound like incantations to me, Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, Mario Monicelli, are dealt with in Thomson's typically stupid terms of contempt. Monicelli, who took his cancer diagnosis at the age of 95 by diving out of the nearest window at San Giovanni Hospital - is completely omitted. But sinning by omission is another of Thomson's faults. Showing off his ignorance is another. He omitted the great Swede Jan Troell from the first four editions of his book. I wrote a lengthy tribute to him in 2014 and as if miraculously Troell appears in the 6th and just as miraculously is hustled off stage after a mere 206 words of misjudgement. He even left out Troell's great short film with Max von Sydow, Stopover in the Marshland, from his filmography. 

Rather than continue to cite his dismissal of dozens of brilliant films and filmmakers, I will concentrate on his bizarre and preposterous hatred for Charlie Chaplin. He commits 1,839 words to one of the most inexplicable hatchet jobs I've ever encountered. At one point in his attack on Chaplin, one of the handful of people who gave the whole world proof that movies were a legitimate art form, he asks "Was Chaplin’s common man so far from Hitler?" My guess is that this querelous question was inspired by the coincidental resemblance between one of the most loved men of the 20th century and the most hated - a resemblance Chaplin made the subject of The Great Dictator, which was his biggest boxoffice success. 

Thomson begins by mentioning Chaplin's "persistent handicap" of "delirious egotism," exposed by his insistence on doing everything himself. "Chaplin the actor has an overbearingly winsome personality that cajoles his films into mawkishness." There is something weird, he thinks, about the contrast between the little tramp and "the clear-eyed inquisitiveness with which Chaplin the director and owner of the film is prompting our response... there is in Chaplin a strange mixture of coy charm and heartless cold… his films worship women with an ingratiating but crippled awe… But the cruelty in Chaplin is also feminine, impetuous, and instinctive… Such egotism expresses Chaplin’s hostility to the world, and suggests how his portrait of the little man pandered to the desire for recognition in anonymous audiences. Similarly, Chaplin’s wistful admiration of women seems ultimately prettier and more rarefied than any woman is capable of—as witness the last, tremulous close-up of City Lights. Was Chaplin’s common man so far from Hitler? He spoke to disappointment, brutalized feelings, and failure and saw that through movies he could concoct a daydream world in which the tramp thrives and in which his whole ethos of self-pity is vindicated," etc., etc. 

So what? Tolstoy wrote a pamphlet claiming that Shakespeare wasn't the great poet and dramatist that everyone else thinks he is. It changed no one's mind. Thomson is no Tolstoy, but even if he were, Chaplin's genius would remain intact and perhaps people would recall Thomson as the guy who hated Charlie Chaplin. 

Though he failed to explain Buster Keaton's belated eclipse of Chaplin (he doesn't understand Keaton, either), he came up with some glib comparisons, which is tantamount to trying to prove that Bartók is better than Debussy: "In maudlin, self-reflective close-up, Chaplin wept in crises. Keaton is the more profound artist because he was not beguiled into comfort by his own self-pity." Never mind that Keaton himself expressed nothing but admiration for Chaplin. 

I'll let someone else contradict Thomson. James Agee: 

Of all comedians [Chaplin] worked most deeply and most shrewdly within a realization of what a human being is, and is up against. The Tramp is as centrally representative of humanity, as many-sided and as mysterious, as Hamlet, and it seems unlikely that any dancer or actor can ever have excelled him in eloquence, variety or poignancy of motion… The finest pantomime, the deepest emotion, the richest and most poignant poetry were in Chaplin’s work. At the end of City Lights the blind girl who has regained her sight, thanks to the Tramp, sees him for the first time. She has imagined and anticipated him as princely, to say the least; and it has never seriously occurred to him that he is inadequate. She recognizes who he must be by his shy, confident, shining joy as he comes silently toward her. And he recognizes himself, for the first time, through the terrible changes in her face. The camera just exchanges a few quiet close-ups of the emotions which shift and intensify in each face. It is enough to shrivel the heart to see, and it is the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in movies. 

It has always been obvious to me that David Thomson can't make up his mind - does he want to be a film critic like James Agee or a gossip columnist like Hedda Hopper? He's a film fan, not a film critic. Late in his review of Thomson's 5th edition, Clive James states, "But surely he is wrong about Fellini, of whom he writes as if the man had had no talent at all." Indeed. One could go on, but to what end? David Thomson is the person that whomever coined the phrase was thinking of when he or she pointed out that opinions are like assholes.